WHAT if there have been a excellent board recreation? Some mixture of boards and items and guidelines – possibly with a few yet-to-be invented additions – that will create an unsurpassable expertise, the solely board recreation anybody ever needs to play?
That’s how physicists really feel about the theory of everything, a putative “final” framework that will clarify all actuality in a single fell swoop. This is the final objective for physics, with Stephen Hawking as soon as memorably writing that to discover it could be to know “the mind of God”.
It is an audacious mission, a lot in order that some folks contemplate it quixotic. At this stage, there could be little question that breaking actuality down into ever extra basic items hasn’t fairly labored. But the potential payoff of a remaining theory is so large that some physicists doggedly refuse to hand over, and now they are pivoting in the direction of a radical new method.
Since a theory of everything has to clarify all the constituent elements of actuality, together with house and time, the concept is that we should begin from an much more fundamental premise. That is why a spate of new would-be remaining theories aren’t grounded in physics in any respect, however in a wild panorama of summary geometry. Perhaps the final scientific reality lies inside the arithmetic of a metaphysical jewel that computes the universe, or a shimmering tapestry of triangles and tetrahedrons?
That would possibly strike you as outlandish, however it is sensible to Peter Woit, a mathematician at Columbia University in New York. “Our best theories are already very deeply geometrical,”…